121 deaths in the US yesterday.
The spread of Delta is a good thing. Few deaths. Widespread immunity building up. This is exactly what you want. But they tell us all to panic.
I first studied Sars-CoV-2 when I heard about it in February of 2020. This one scared me mainly because it has a proof-reading gene which snips errors making it much less prone to mutations. This has two impacts, one that it would continue to be as deadly as it was from the first, two that the possibility of long term effectiveness of a vaccine was good. “It’ll kill you, but the vaccine will work.”
Single strand RNA viruses are extremely prone to mutation. Then natural selection inevitably propagates those mutations which are both more contagious and less virulent. This has been happening ever since the fall of Adam. It has happened with Spanish Flu and with Bird Flu and is now happening with COVID-19 though until now rather slowly because of that gene I mentioned.
What I did not know a year and a half ago is that the virus has no protection against mutation of the copy protection gene itself! The Brazilians observed that happening, and I read about that last Fall sometime. Now we are seeing exactly what you describe, way more contagious, and way less deadly.
Here is a link to read more:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7560320/pdf/peerj-08-10181.pdf
Or search: “mutation of Sars-Cov-2 nsp14” for more recent stuff